On September 26, 2014, police found the body of 20-year-old Shao Tong, a Chinese undergraduate at Iowa State University, in the trunk of a car registered in her name parked in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Iowa City. She had been reported missing nine days earlier. The cause of death was found to be homicide by suffocation.

Shao Tong, courtesy Wikipedia

On September 3, 2014, Karen Yang, a friend of Li’s, got a call from him. He said that he had called Shao but for some reason she did not answer the phone, but he could hear her conversing with another boy about him, making disparaging remarks. After he called Karen, he posted “fuck my life” in Chinese to his page on Renren, a social networking site popular with Chinese college students. It was his last post to the site.

Nevetheless, the two took advantage of the ensuing weekend to spend some time together. Since Li’s presence was not desired by Shao’s roommates, they got into the beige 1997 Toyota Camry she had bought during a summer internship in Kentucky, and checked into the Budget Inn off US Route 30 near Nevada, a small town east of Ames, on September 5. The hotel owner, Ken Patel, recognized them from two earlier stays over holiday weekends.

The following night, Ken said he saw Shao come to the lobby alone. It would be the last time anyone other than Li saw her alive. On the morning of September 7, Ken said that he woke and saw that Shao’s gold car, in which the two had come from Ames, was already gone. This was unusual, he later stated, because on the couple’s previous stays he had had to go to their room after they missed the 11 a.m. checkout time. While the hotel had a security camera on constantly, its feed was not recorded anywhere.

That night, Shao’s father sent a text to her phone from China. He wanted to know if she had had any success replacing a pair of glasses she told him several days earlier that she had lost. The responding text said that she had borrowed a pair from a friend. He asked if they could video chat: she said she was too busy at the time. In retrospect, he believed that those messages actually came from Li.

Another text, purportedly from Shao, was sent from Li’s phone to one of Shao’s roommates. It said that Li was going back to China due to an “emergency” and that she was going to take a bus to Minnesota and visit some friends from China there in the next week. The following day, Karen sent Li a text asking how things were going with Shao. “Fine for now,” he responded.

A week later, on September 16, Li’s birthday, Karen sent him a text. He did not respond. “He was never like that,” Karen recalled later to a Chinese publication. “He replied to messages promptly.” She began to suspect that something was wrong.

Around that time, Shao’s roommates began to wonder when she was planning to return as the week had passed and they had not heard from her. Through social media, they contacted her friends in Minnesota. None of them had seen her. “That’s when we started to get really worried,” one said. They reported her missing to Ames police on September 18.

Ames police were unable to find any evidence that Shao had taken a bus to Minnesota. They searched Shao’s apartment the following week. They found a receipt for the Toyota Camry Shao had purchased in Kentucky, which still had that state’s license plates on it. On September 26, they made the description and plate number of the car available to other police departments.

Police in Iowa City had obtained a search warrant for Li’s BMW the previous week, parked near his apartment off US Route 6 on the eastern outskirts of the city. On the evening that their Ames counterparts posted the information about Shao’s car, they found it nearby. Residents of the complex said it had been there for some time, and complained of the smell emanating from it. After a warrant was obtained, police found a body in the trunk, its decomposition accelerated by exposure to the late summer heat. It was later confirmed to be Shao.

Police immediately called the death suspicious. The autopsy found the cause of death to be asphyxiation and blunt force trauma likely inflicted by another person. It did not fix a time of death beyond that when her body was discovered due to the lack of information about the circumstances in which it occurred. Her head was found wrapped tightly in a towel consistent with those at the Nevada Budget Inn where she and Li had stayed, and next to the body in the trunk was a 15-pound barbell.

Also in the trunk were travel documents showing that on September 6, Li had booked a flight from Eastern Iowa Airport in nearby Cedar Rapids to Chicago and then to Beijing. Cell phone records showed that the texts to Shao’s friends had been sent from Chicago while he was laying over there between flights. In Li’s apartment, police found further evidence suggesting a hasty departure. Groceries had not been put away, an open container of milk had been left on a counter long enough for it to have spoiled, and luggage had been left behind.

Early in 2015, authorities in Johnson County charged Li with first-degree murder and obtained an arrest warrant. Chinese Internet users began circulating pictures of Li, who remained at large. After Chinese detectives traveled to Iowa to visit the crime scene and review evidence, they too charged Li with intentional murder under Chinese law, which allows the prosecution of any Chinese citizen for a crime, even if it occurred abroad. He surrendered to police in his native, Wenzhou, in May. The case was prosecuted there, since not only is there no extradition treaty between Chinese and the United States, China does not extradite its own citizens. In March 2016, Li pleaded guilty and was given a life sentence.